I was in Auckland earlier in the week attending a transport conference. Taking a bus through town, I snapped this shot while stopped at the lights (excuse the reflections from the bus window):
In case you haven’t come across this yet, this is a bike from the OnzO dockless bike share scheme. Unlike the fixed-dock schemes like our own Christchurch bikeshare, these systems rely on people being able to access/unlock them anywhere via a smartphone app and park them wherever they want (built-in GPS helps the system to track them). This makes it easy to distribute them easily across a wide area very quickly – which is what happened in Auckland about a month ago, much to the surprise of everyone (including Auckland Transport…).
The downside is the problem of being parked indiscriminately anywhere, including blocking footpaths and taking up bike parking spaces where other people might want to park their own bikes… Needless to say, dockless bike share schemes are a work in progress worldwide, and even potentially a race to the bottom…
The issue is quite topical at the moment because both Auckland and Christchurch are currently looking into the implementation of large-scale public bike-share schemes. Until the recent introduction of OnzO, Auckland has only briefly flirted with bike share in the city. Christchurch has had its pilot scheme for the past two-and-a-bit years, but now tenders are open for introducing a larger scheme, initially for the CBD and Riccarton. What form these will take remains to be seen; maybe we will see some of these dockless bikes in the city…
Are you looking forward to an expansion of Christchurch’s bikeshare?
I recently moved from Christchurch to Melbourne and here they have the Melbourne Bike Share – very similar to what’s been done in Christchurch so far but more widespread around Melbourne’s CBD. There’s also dockless Obikes, essentially what OnzO is.
Now Obike – what a mess! A Google search will get you just what OnzO might become, a blight of cheap wrecks dumped, well, everwhere.
During November, Obike had a promotion where every ride was free so I thought I’d download the app and give it a go. There were loads of bikes near my house but half of them were damaged, and of the non-damaged ones they were in such bad shape I didn’t even bother. Utter rubbish. None of them had helmets.
Don’t get me wrong, I LOVE the idea. But because of human nature, and Obike not keeping up with removing junked bikes, they’ve become a blight. I feel it gives cycling in general a bad name.
Perhaps if it was a local company that could be held more accountable things might be improved?
Melbourne Bike Share is slightly better, but each individule ride has to be within 45 minutes and there’s no docks for the bikes outside the CBD. Most of the bikes are in dire need of maintenance.
It will be very interesting to see how things go for Auckland indeed!
Things are not going well in Auckland…the scheme is a total failure…students and criminals have basically hijacked most of the bikes for their own personal use…and the rest are being left in public parks and small side streets once they are trashed…disaster…cheap always comes at a price…why do cities even need bike share? the importance is overstated and nothing i’ve seen anywhere around the world so far justifies all the significant issues they create….money better spent on building cyclelanes….should be the priority…